Journeys of a quilter in art, dyeing, and handquilting.

The Beginning of a Lupine Series!

Every quilt project begins with a little motivation to start. Motivation can come from many places, where do you find yours? This time, mine came from talking with a friend. I had an idea in my head on what I wanted to quilt, but somehow the interest in going from idea to reality wasn’t materializing. Then I had lunch with a friend, and pulled out the sketches I had for the quilt. We then started talking about colors and technique as I was pulling out fabric. Before I knew it, I was enthusiastic about the project and didn’t want to stop.

I want to do a series of lupines, playing with scale and color. I also recently discovered the quilt book, 15 minutes of Play, and how to make “made fabric!” I started getting an idea of what I wanted the background of the lupine quilts to be, imagining multiple shades of blue …

I divided my scraps up into shades of blue, and started making small squares of fabric. It was so lovely to cut, stitch, sew in such a meditative fashion. Time flew by without me hardly noticing.

Very quickly I had many squares of light, medium, and dark blue and a pink blue!

I arranged all the squares into four layouts, and stitched those together, to be the background for the four lupine quilts.

Next: on to the flowers! I decided to do raw edge applique, and began by tracing the shapes of the stems and petals onto fusible webbing, and selecting colors for the petals.

Cutting, ironing, placing, fusing … The meditative aspect of this quilt continues! In the end, I had a lovely small quilt top ready to quilt and a pile of scraps! One done, three more to go.